From an evolutionary aspect, why do different races have differently styled eyes?

Question

For example, why do Caucasians have folds in their eyelids whereas Asians don't, and why do Asians commonly have more slanted eyes than other races?

Answer 1

Short answer: there is no evolutionary reason because there is no correlation between the functional differences in the eyes and the climate and culture of the people. The eyes are different because the skulls are different.
Speculate all you want, the only true answer is that we really don't know.

btw. to the cold redneck, Eskimos have eyes like that because they are genetically related to Altaic people like the Evenki, Buryats and Koreans. not from squinting.
A question, why do a lot of scottish and viking descent people have hooded eyes? cold climates too there need to do a lot of squinting. Yet hooded eyes are only good for shielding from the sun when it is above which doesn't happen where they're from.

Answer 2

You can read the late Ashley Montagu's "Falacy of Race". His thesis is that the concept of race is false. The categories that were chosen to "separate" the races where arbritary.

We are a bunch of tribes. We see strangers and we want to find what attributes we want to compare that would make "us" different from "them". Visual cues are easy so we used them. Why not define race by whether we could we could tolerate lactose? Or by blood type? Or hair density?

The bottom line is that we are ONE species which has adapted to various parts of the world in different ways (by accident or by natural selection). "Slanted" eyes offer no advantage or disadvantage. 100,000 years ago, maybe there was a major chief who had double eye-lid folds, he had thousands of off-springs, etc. We chose mates usually by traits that we observe within our early childhood. Double fold was more common in Europe while single fold was more common in Far Eastern Asia.

Answer 3

ever wondered why eskimos had eyes like that too ?

back in the day.. 1000s years ago.. living in such snowly climents.. they had to squint their eyes ..
so now..
their eyes are naturally squint...

from the chinese and japanese.. it was from the sun.. working in the fields

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and as to what Paul C and Kitiany said..
ITs Called anthropology .. thats how we kno
look it up..

its not beacuse some chinese dude had a fold in his eyes .. so then all his offpring had them too.. no... its beacuse of the environment.. after many 100s..and 1000s of years our appearances evolve with the environment.
Now most of the chinese and Japanese look very similar to eachother because they've been around much longer then us north and south americans. the United States has only been around for lil over 200 years.. whereas the Chinese have been around for 1000s of years .. and i'm sure they didn't marry any out of their own land. but thats a whole different story

Answer 4

I'll be watching this for an answer, i'll bet some anti Darwin person is gonna say that evolution did not happen and we came from Adam and Eve. ha-ha

Answer 5

Local variations need not have any real purpose. It's just genetic drift in action.